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Financial News presents a round-up of the top hires and job switches in the financial services industry that you may have missed over the last week.

• Moves of the WeekCredit Suisse
Credit Suisse Group is parting company with US private banking head Philip Vasan, according to an internal memo, marking the latest impact of a shake-up at the Swiss bank.

The move was announced in the same week that it unveiled a new unit to target wealthy entrepreneurs in Asia, to be headed by Vikram Malhotra (pictured), a former investment banking chief for the region.

Zurich-based Credit Suisse is shifting focus under recently-appointed chief executive Tidjane Thiam, who took over in July. The new strategy involves bolstering private banking efforts in Asia, as well as unloading Credit Suisse’s US-based private banking business to Wells Fargo by next year, among other measures.

Vasan will leave Credit Suisse in the spring, after the expected transfer of the private banking unit to Wells Fargo, according to a memo seen by The Wall Street Journal. He has been with Credit Suisse for more than two decades. Before becoming the head of US private banking, Vasan ran Credit Suisse’s prime-brokerage unit, providing services to hedge funds.

He couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

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Under the bank’s new strategy unveiled by Thiam last month, Credit Suisse aims to redouble its wealth management efforts in Asia, where demand for banking services for the wealthy is soaring. Vasan was tapped in 2013 by Thiam’s predecessor, former chief executive Brady Dougan, to oversee a turnaround effort at the bank’s US private banking unit, which had been losing money.
But Thiam has opted for a swift exit from US private banking, rather than prolonging efforts to revamp the unit. “In the US, our domestic private banking business isn’t currently positioned to compete in scale without significant investment or acquisition,” Credit Suisse said in October, as part of an announcement regarding its strategy changes.

Other shifts under way at the bank include cutting the amount of capital used by Credit Suisse’s investment bank, and a new effort to bolster the bank’s presence in the domestic Swiss market.

Alongside his strategic plans unveiled in October, Thiam announced a series of changes to the bank’s executive board, including the departure of Vasan’s boss Rob Shafir as co-head of private banking and wealth management. Shafir continues to serve as chairman of the Americas for Credit Suisse, which offers investment banking and asset-management services in the region. Shafir’s counterpart, former co-head of private banking Hans-Ulrich Meister, also left the bank’s executive board.

Malhotra, who most recently ran investment banking for Asia Pacific, will lead a new unit focused on the bank’s “most significant” ultra-high net worth entrepreneur clients in Asia, according to an internal memo viewed by The Wall Street Journal. His mandate will be to grow activity both in the investment and private bank among such clients, according to the memo.

He will be replaced by Mervyn Chow and Edwin Low as co-heads of the investment bank and capital markets department in Asia Pacific, according to a source familiar with the matter. They will be responsible for coverage of corporate clients. Chow was most recently head of Credit Suisse’s global markets solutions group in Asia Pacific, while Low was most recently co-head of southeast Asia in its investment banking department.

Advent International
The global private equity firm has hired the chairman of Fitness First as an operating partner to help identify new deal opportunities in the leisure sector.

The private equity firm has hired Andrew Cosslett to work with its retail, consumer and leisure team to seek deals. Cosslett will also help support Advent’s current and future portfolio company activity, the firm said in a statement on November 17.

Cosslett has spent 35 years working in numerous senior roles across the retail, consumer and leisure sectors, including roles at Unilever and Cadbury Schweppes before becoming chief executive of InterContinental Hotels Group.

He was chief executive of Fitness First between 2012 and July 2015 before becoming chairman, and served as chairman of England Rugby 2015, the organising committee for Rugby World Cup, and is an independent director of the Rugby Football Union.

Advent has invested in more than 65 companies in the retail, consumer and leisure sectors across 19 different countries. The firm’s current and previous investments in the sector include UK furniture retailer DFS, German perfume retailer Douglas Holdings and Canadian sports clothing company Lululemon.

Advent’s operating partner programme includes more than 60 senior industry executives who work in specific sectors and serve as independent consultants to Advent and its portfolio companies.

Barclays
Barclays has further reshaped its investment bank by naming macro markets head Mike Bagguley as chief operating officer of the unit.

Bagguley, a 14-year Barclays veteran, will take a key role in accelerating the ongoing restructure, reporting to investment bank chief executive Tom King, according to an internal memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Barclays has been cutting staff and exiting businesses in its investment bank to adapt to increased regulation and changes in investor activity. The group’s new chief executive, Jes Staley, has pledged to speed up an overhaul centred on the division and its fixed income, currencies and commodities business.

Bagguley told The Wall Street Journal in October that “the old FICC models no longer work” because of higher capital requirements imposed by global banking regulators. Across the industry, European fixed income trading volumes dropped 24% in the third quarter compared with the year before, according to Trax, a subsidiary of MarketAxess Holdings.

The slowdown in client activity and regulatory pressures have also forced rivals such as Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse to shrink their investment banks.

In the memo on November 17, King said the division’s third-quarter results, announced in October, “further validate the strategic choices we made last year but there is more to do”. The investment bank posted a 12% rise in pre-tax profits in the three months to September 30, to £317 million from £284 million.

Bagguley’s previous role as head of macro products will be jointly held by Rob Bogucki and Nat Tyce, co-heads of macro trading, and Kashif Zafar, head of macro distribution, King said.

• Investment BankingLazard
The independent advisory firm has hired Oleksandr Bihun as a vice-president focused on private technology firms in the UK, reporting to Cyrus Kapadia, Lazard’s deputy head of UK investment banking. Bihun used to work for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where, according to his LinkedIn profile, he was involved in transactions including advising the private equity firm Apax Partners on its acquisition of the Nordic IT company Evry. Before that, Bihun worked at Nomura in technology investment banking.

Nomura
Nomura has recruited six investment bankers from rival firms, as it bolsters its North American capital markets and M&A practice. They include Macquarie industrials M&A specialists James Frawley and Peter Finn. Frawley was Macquarie’s US head of M&A and becomes a managing director, Finn was a senior vice-president of acquisitions at Macquarie and becomes an executive director in Nomura’s industrials M&A group. The Japanese advisory firm has also made Garrett Carpenter and Christina Park managing directors in its acquisition leveraged finance group. Carpenter was at Bank of America Merrill Lynch for 13 years, while Park joins Nomura from Barclays. Equity capital markets have also been bolstered, with the appointment of Mark Connelly. He spent 22 years at UBS between 1987 and 2009, before joining Jefferies. Finally, former Citi banker Carl Torrillo has joined Nomura as an industrials investment banker.

Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bank has unveiled a raft of promotions across its ­equities team, as it looks to equities trading as one of its growth businesses. The bank announced a nine-person global equities executive committee in an internal memo on November 18 that was seen by Financial News and confirmed by a Deutsche Bank spokesman. Rick Saunders has been promoted to head of equity trading, in addition to being head of equities for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Brad Kurtzman, the head of equity derivatives in the US, becomes head of equity derivatives and head of trading for Americas equities. Garth Ritchie, Deutsche’s head of global equities, takes on the new role as head of global markets in a restructuring of the bank’s corporate banking and securities operations. The other new appointments include Ashley Wilson and Greg Bunn as co-heads of prime finance.

• Asset ManagementNeuberger Berman
Neuberger Berman has appointed Christian Puschmann as head of its client group for Germany and Austria. The employee-owned investment manager has made a series of hires since September, bringing in Jonathan Geoghegan from HSBC to its UK financial institutions group and Javier Nuñez de Villavicencio from BNP Paribas to run the investment firm’s operations in Spain and Portugal. Puschmann joins Neuberger Berman from Invesco, where he was deputy head of institutional sales.

Eastspring Investments
Eastspring Investments, the Asian fund owned by Prudential, has hired a team of asset managers. Bonnie Chan joins the firm’s infrastructure team as a portfolio manager from Jefferies, while Mandeep Sachdeva arrives from Fidelity to run an emerging market equities fund. In other moves, Shea Pei, a former Fidelity analyst, will become a fixed-income portfolio manager and Arthur Kadish, who moves from Shanghai, has joined the equities team.

M&G
M&G Real Estate Investments, the property management arm of M&G Investments, has appointed Olivier Vellay as head of investment for continental Europe. ­Vellay joins from Quarters Capital, a firm he founded which advised private equity funds on real estate investments across France. Before that, Vellay held senior roles at MGPA, Morgan Stanley and General Electric Real Estate. He will report to Tony Brown, chief investment officer, and will be based at M&G’s Paris Office.

• Hedge Funds & WealthMartin Currie
Paul Kirkby, who has more than 30 years’ experience in Japanese investments, and his co-manager, Paul Smith, are joining Edinburgh-based asset manager, Martin Currie. Kirkby will take the helm of Martin Currie’s overall $425 million Japan long/short offering, overseeing both Smith, who will continue to run the $167 million RIT PK Japan Fund (which Kirkby and Smith are bringing to Martin Currie), and Claire Marwick, who manages the Martin Currie Japan long/short fund.

Alva Capital
Alva Capital, a hedge fund that invests in credit markets, has appointed Steven Gladstone as chief operating officer. Gladstone spent five years as director of operations, credit funds, at Pamplona Capital Management. A start-up, Alva Capital was set up in 2015 by Alex Vaskevitch, a former fixed-income fund manager at LNG Capital.

Towry
Peter O’Donnell has joined wealth manager Towry as an investment director in London. O’Donnell joins from Brewin Dolphin where he was an investment director for nine years. At Towry, he will focus on managing discretionary and advisory clients within Ashcourt Rowan Asset Management – which Towry bought in May 2015. He is a 30-year veteran of the private client industry having started his career with Hoare Govett. O’Donnell subsequently worked for HSBC James Capel for 16 years before moving to Brewin Dolphin.

• Trading & TechnologyICAP
Former Barclays banker Tim Cartledge has become chief strategy officer at ICAP-owned foreign exchange and fixed ­income technology company EBS BrokerTec, joining the executive management team. The move comes as Barclays is set to pay $150 million to the New York Department of Financial Services to settle foreign exchange market abuse claims. Cartledge was a managing director at Barclays between 2004 and 2014, before becoming the head of electronic trading, fixed income, currencies and commodities in 2014. Cartledge left the UK bank in May 2015. ICAP has switched its focus ­towards electronic trading with the completion of the £1.1 billion sale of its voice broking business to Tullett Prebon.

Saxo Payments
Paul Townsend has joined the board of Saxo Payments as a non-executive director. He is currently managing director of Vitesse PSP, a business he founded in 2013. The FX and payments company, owned by the Danish brokerage Saxo Bank, provides transaction services to the fintech sector.

• Private EquityBlackstone
Blackstone has appointed Isauro Alfaro as senior adviser, based in Mexico. In a 28-year career in finance, Alfaro worked as a banker at Credit Suisse Mexico before co-founding Alfaro, Dávila y Rios, a restructuring advisory firm. Alfaro will advise Blackstone on its investment opportunities in Mexico, the alternatives firm confirmed in a statement.

Charme Capital Partners
Three former Doughty Hanson executives have joined forces with an Italy-focused private equity firm to establish a new pan-European fund, for which it has raised €450 million so far. Julian Huxtable, a former partner and head of UK at Doughty Hanson, Christopher Fielding, who was a partner in London, and Francisco Churtichaga, who was a Madrid-based partner at the private equity firm, have teamed up with Milan-based Charme Capital Partners, previously known as Montezemolo & Partners, to establish a new pan-European private equity firm. The three ­executives, who left Doughty Hanson in the summer, have ­become partners at the firm. Huxtable and Fielding will be focused on the UK, while Churtichaga will focus on the Spanish market.

•Legal, Regulatory & CompliancePwC
PwC has boosted its pensions and investment consulting team with the appointment of Leo Ring and Hannah Carter. Ring joins as a director from KPMG’s pensions actuarial team, while Carter was previously at Aon Hewitt. Ring will be focused on growing and regional presence and Carter will work with trustees and sponsors to produce investment strategies.

Gordon Dadds
Tax lawyer Huw Witty has joined law firm Gordon Dadds as a partner and head of tax. Witty will specialise in corporate finance, capital market transactions and property. He joins from Fladgate where he spent six years as a partner and head of tax. He arrives at a time of expansion for Gordon Dadds, which in October acquired Jeffrey Green Russell in a £30 million deal.

Correction: Jonathan Geoghegan is a member of the UK financial institutions and intermediaries team at Neuberger Berman, not the head of it as originally stated. This has now been corrected.